Red
by PragmaticHominid
Summary: Origin story for Azazel. In 1923, Red Army soldiers discover a young child with red skin, a devil's tail and an extraordinary ability haunting a small village in Siberia. The boy, who is taken into custody and delivered to a top secret "orphanage" outside of Moscow, attracts the attention of revolutionary leaders Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Leon Trotsky.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One**

**I. (1923) **

In the dorm room at the orphans' home where Azazel came to live when he was five years old, a picture hang over the doorway.

It was a picture of a slight man, almost as scrawny as Azazel had been when the soldiers brought him here. The picture only showed what was up past the man's elbows, but Azazel thought it looked like his dark gray jacket was too big on him. The man had a small upturned nose and a pointed beard, but the top of his head was almost completely bald.

The man in the picture didn't look strong – not physically – but Azazel thought he looked _forceful_, somehow, and there was a sly little half-smile on his face that made Azazel want to smile back in the same way.

That picture was a constant. It was the last thing he looked at before he fell asleep and the first thing he saw in morning. The man in the picture was named comrade Lenin, and he was spoken of so frequently and with such fond admiration by the teachers and the other children alike that before very long Azazel began to associate him with all the good things that had come into his life since the soldiers found him, with the soft bed and the good food, the toys and books and lessons and all the rest of it.

Even before Lenin came to visit him, Azazel felt as though he – he himself specifically – had somehow come under his protection and his care. This was a feeling that was of the utmost importance to the boy, though he kept it close to his heart and closely guarded, because before he'd come to the orphanage Azazel had never loved or been loved by anyone else.

**II. **

Before the soldiers came for Azazel, there had only been degradation. There had been kicks and curses and a chain wrapped around his ankle, binding him within the shadowy confines of a horse's stall. His world had been hunger and hate and cold so blistering that the chapped skin of his hands cracked and bled, the red blood running almost invisible against his skin.

The soldiers had come looking for him after Azazel had found that he didn't have to wear the chain anymore, nor sit still and let people hit him. The other people had always been afraid of him – he'd understood that for as long as he'd been old enough to understand anything – but when found that they couldn't keep him captive any longer they'd gone completely mad with fear.

Azazel was only five years old, but he'd sensed his advantaged and pressed it, using his new ability to torment the worst of the people who'd mistreated him for as long as he could remember. He learned very quickly that he could draw howls of fright simply by appearing without warning in front of someone else. And the reactions became even funnier if he made faces or swiped at the air with his fingers curved like bear's claws.

He haunted the village for almost a week, scaring people off the privy and making general mischief, all the while taking whatever he wanted to eat from whatever house he wanted to take it.

But then the soldiers came, and they weren't so easy to tease. He watched them from ceiling beams and shadowy places for hours after they arrived in the village, studying them while they hunted for him.

After a while, a few of the soldiers sat down to take a break, and Azazel watched one of them bring out a trench knife and begin to sharpen it against whetstone. As soon as Azazel saw that knife, which was twice the length of his own hand and shiny, he began to want to have it very badly, though he could not have said exactly why.

Acting on impulse, he appeared in front of the man with a cloud of smoke, his lips pulled up in a snarl. It was a tactic that he had used to get things he wanted – food or trinkets – from others many times, as people almost always dropped whatever they were holding and ran in the other direction upon his arrival.

But this time it didn't work out that way.

Instead of dropping the knife the man lunged forward, swiping at Azazel's face with the blade – making contact once, then again.

The pain was debilitating, and he staggered backwards, howling, hands clutched over his cut face while the blood welled between his fingers. In the fog of his agony, he'd forgotten completely how to do his new disappearing trick, and he could only stumble backwards while the soldier rushed toward him, still swinging the blade.

Azazel tripped over some unseen thing and fell into a second set of arms. It was another of the soldiers, and this one picked Azazel up and pinned him against his chest. He struggled to free himself, but the soldier was so much bigger than Azazel was, and he was stupid with pain and fear. He jabbed at the soldier's body with the sharp tip of his tail, but the man was wrapped securely in a heavy woolen greatcoat, so it made no difference.

The soldier who had captured him turned his back on the one with the knife. He squatted down to open a canvas bag with one hand, while he supported Azazel against himself with the other.

The man with the knife was shouting about devils and monsters, and Azazel knew that meant him – he had no illusions about what he was – but the second soldier just ignored him.

Azazel couldn't see what either of them were doing. He couldn't see anything. There was blood in his right eye, and the left was pressed against the soldier's chest.

He felt the prick of something sharp against his skin, trivial when compared with the agony in his face. Much later, he would understand that he'd been given a morphine injection, but at the time he'd no explanation for the fogginess that entered his brain, or for the creeping cold numbness that was spreading through his limbs. He clutched at the soldier's greatcoat and pressed the good side of his face against the man's chest, whimpering.

"It's a demon," he could hear the man with the knife knife insisting, as though from a great distance.

Azazel's soldier straighten and whirl toward the other, setting Azazel's entire world spinning. "Backwards, superstitious fool," he hissed between his teeth. "He's a _toddler_!"

And then the blackness swallowed Azazel whole.

**III.**

When he woke again, he was tucked inside the soldier's greatcoat, his own head sticking out below the soldier's chin. They were on horseback, moving with a rhythmic rocking motion that made him feel queasy. His tail twitched uneasily, sandwiched between the fabric of the soldier's uniform and the greatcoat.

His face hurt. There was something over it, covering one of his eyes, and when he reached up tentatively to touch it his fingers brushed against cloth bandages.

"Careful now," the soldier said, and Azazel could feel the rumble of his chest when he spoke.

Azazel thought about fleeing, but he hadn't resources for it – neither the energy nor the drive. His head felt as though it was stuffed with sodden wool, and at the moment he didn't think he could have teleported to save his own life.

And anyway, it was warm and comfortable inside the soldier's greatcoat. He was still very scared, but he found that he didn't want to leave. He drew his hand back inside the coat, away from the nip of the autumn wind.

"You alright in there?" the soldier asked. Azazel wasn't sure how to answer that – he wasn't accustomed to being addressed directly – so he didn't reply.

For his part, the soldier wasn't used to being ignored. "You can speak, can't you?"

"I can talk," Azazel said. And he could, only it hurt his face.

"Very good. What's your name?"

"Azazel," he said.

The soldier paused, then he shook his head like a horse with a fly in his ear. Casting his good eye upward, Azazel could see his chin going back and forth. There was gray in the man's short, black beard. "That's not a proper name for a little boy."

"I'm not a boy," Azazel told him. "I'm a little red devil." This was what everyone had always said about him, and he accepted it on faith.

The soldier snorted. "You're red anyway, but that's alright, my boy. So am I."

This was an outrageous lie; even Azazel – who'd up until then had little experience in telling the truth from falsehoods and who would never be especially good at detecting liars – could tell that much. "You aren't even! You – you're _white_!"

"Now, be careful you don't insult me, comrade. Those are fighting words."

Azazel lapsed into sullen silence, but the soldier didn't seem to mind. He went on. "All of Russia's red now, or will be soon enough. We fought and bled to see to that, the Red Army did, and we won out. And now – listen to this, my boy, it's important – now all the workers of the world are going to see how we fought and how we won, and they'll take us as an example, and take up arms to earn their own freedom.

"You picked a good time to be born red, child. The future is red, and it's bright, and we're bringing into existence a world without chains."

"I had a chain on," Azazel told him. He would have pointed to ankle if he could have moved within the confines of the greatcoat. "I took it off."

"Simple as that, isn't it? Good for you, but you should try not to blame those peasants back there for it. They aren't the enemy, it's only that they're ignorant. They need to be educated.

"Now, tell me – Do you know where we are going?"

"... Somewhere else?" Azazel ventured.

"We are going to go ride on a train. How does that sound to you, my boy?" Azazel had only the vaguest concept of what a train was. He'd certainly never seen one, not even in a picture. In any case, this time the soldier did not seem to require an answer to his question. "I served on Comrade Trotsky's war train, back in 1918 and '19, back when the Revolution was fighting for its life. That damned old train went all over the countryside, delivering food and ammunition and whatever else was needed by the troops, and it carried a printing press to boot. What do you know that, Azazel?"

"Nothin'," Azazel said, wearily. Every word he spoke was making his face hurt worse than before.

"That's alright," the soldier told him. "You'll learn all about history once we get you squared away into a school. That train got a decoration, did you know that? The Order of the Red Flag. They put the train in the civil war museum, in Moscow. Maybe you'll go and visit it someday."

"Is that where we're going? Moscow?" He'd heard of Moscow, at least.

"Truth is, I'm not sure where we're bound. I need to send a telegram about _you_, my boy, so we can get that much worked out. All sorts of important people are going to take an interest in you, I can promise you that."


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

The soldier had ridden on for most of the day, Azazel nestled within the warmth of the greatcoat. As he rode he spoke incessantly of the dangerous and heady days of the Revolution, and of the Civil War, with all its privations and horrors and glories.

Azazel could follow almost none of this, but he liked the flow of the soldier's voice – he liked being _spoken to_, because no one had ever done that before, at least not kindly or at length – and though he did not understand much of what was said, the words had a great impression on him.

At one point during the ride, the soldier reached up to pull a locket from beneath his undershirt, and flicked open the clasp one-handed to show Azazel what was inside. It held two photographs – ikons, Azazel thought, not entirely wrong. The first was of a bald man with high cheekbones and a jovial expression, and the soldier named him Lenin. The man in the second picture was more fierce looking, with a great tangle of hair and direct, piercing eyes, and the soldier told Azazel that this was Trotsky. So then at least Azazel had faces to put to some of the names the soldier spoke of.

"Now, don't you go telling them I have this," the soldier warned Azazel, tucking the locket back under his shirt. "They'd be very annoyed with me – especially comrade Trotsky. Those two get bored of their own faces these days, I think, seeing them plastered up everywhere."

Toward evening they rode into a village, much larger than the one Azazel had lived in before. Azazel had never imagined so many people – there must have been hundreds, and they all came out of their homes to stare.

The people here did not seem as hungry or as worn down as those from the place that Azazel had left behind, yet they watched him with the same hateful and frightened eyes with which the people of his home village had always regarded him. Moreover, it seemed to Azazel that they liked the soldier little more than they did him, which confused the boy.

They were taken to a massive house – the biggest in the village, and much larger than any Azazel had seen before – with four rooms and wooden floorboards instead of simple bare earth. Because of the size of the place, Azazel was sure that many people must have lived there, and yet when the soldier carried him inside they found it to be empty save for one old woman.

She sat in a rocking chair near an oil lamp, her gnarled fingers busy with some piece of knitting, and she did not so much as look up, let alone rise to greet them. When the soldier asked her questions, the old woman replied tersely and without taking her eyes from her work.

"Wait for me here," the soldier told Azazel, sitting him on the edge of one of the beds before going outside.

He had been gone for a long time before the old woman bothered to look up from her knitting. She stared at Azazel for a long moment, her expression neither surprised or especially impressed, but said nothing.

"I'm a demon," he informed her.

"Of course you are, child," the old woman said, and went back to her knitting.

"No, actually he isn't," the soldier said, coming back inside. He was carrying a metal wash tub, which he sat on the stove. "I sent a telegram," the soldier added to Azazel, though the boy had no idea what that even meant. "We should have our orders by morning."

"I don't know why I should doubt his word," the kulak woman said without looking up. "It seems to me that the country has been overrun by devils as of late." The soldier turned to stare at her, and there was something hard and dangerous in his eyes, but if the old woman felt his gaze on her she didn't show it. Her knitting needles clicked on. "Of course, I mean the Germans," she said, but even Azazel could tell that she didn't really mean the Germans.

"You must be senile," the soldier said. "That war's been over and done with for half a decade now."

"The past is the happy refuge of the aged," the old woman said, and the soldier turned his back on her in disgust and went outside again.

He came back with a pail of water, which he poured into the wash tub. The soldier fed the fire inside the stove until it was crackling, and then made two additional trips outside for more water.

While he was waiting for the water to heat up, the soldier took a shaving kit from his pack and laid its contents out neatly on the bed beside Azazel.

Azazel stared avidly at the blade of the straight-razor, his bandaged face reflected in its surface. But when he reached his hand toward it, the soldier said sharply, "Don't touch that," and Azazel drew his fingers back.

The soldier picked up a small pair of clippers and knelt on the floor in front of Azazel. "Let me see your hand," he said, and so Azazel did. The soldier took his tiny fingers in his own large and calloused hand, spreading them out gently. Then he clipped the nails, which were very long and ragged, and filed the edges smooth. When he was done, he helped Azazel take his shoes off and gave his feet the same treatment.

When he was done, he stood Azazel up on his feet. "Go stand by the stove," he instructed him. "I need to shave your head – you have lice."

"Nasty creatures," the old woman said, as though speaking to herself. "I'd like to poison them all.

"I mean the lice, of course," she added, after a long pause.

"One parasite is much the same as all of the others," the soldier snapped at her. The old woman didn't say anything to that, but her knitting needles clicked more loudly.

The bandages had be be removed first. Azazel didn't cry when the soldier peeled them away – never in his memory had he gotten anything from crying except a cuff, and so he regarded such behavior as entirely futile – but an involuntary whimper escaped him one or twice, when the soldier had to pull away parts of the bandage which had become stuck to the cuts on his face.

The old woman was watching him now, for a change, and her knitting needles were silent. "Tough little monster," she said, not unappreciatively. No one answered her.

The soldier cut Azazel's hair away deftly, barely pulling, and threw the matted clumps into the fire as he went. By the time he had finished, the water on the stove was steaming, so the soldier took the tub and placed in on the floor.

"Bath time," the soldier said. That was a concept of which Azazel's understanding was decidedly foggy, but once the soldier had lifted him up and put him in the water, he decided that it had been a very good idea. He splashed, first with his hands and then the flat of his tail, delighting in the ripples.

"Ach," the soldier said, rearing back when the water splashed in his face. "Now, you stop that," he told Azazel, wiping off his spectacles, but he wasn't angry.

Azazel looked down at his own hands in wonder, at the neatly trim crescent shaped nails, so shiny and nice and red, and at the way his skin seemed almost to glow, not that it was clean. Under all the dirt, he was a brighter shade of red than he'd ever realized.

He never wanted to get out of the tub, and the water had turned icy cold before the soldier finally insisted that he must.

Azazel picked up his old clothing, which was really nothing more than rags, and stared down at it in despair. He'd never before realized how badly it smelled.

The old woman sat her knitting down with a disgruntled sigh, and went into one of the other rooms. When she came back there was a small bundle of boy's clothing in her arms, and she dropped it on the bed next to Azazel. The cloth was coarse and moth-eaten, and the furs were balding with age, and it had all clearly spent years at the bottom of some chest, but it was nicer than anything Azazel had ever had for himself. He looked up at her, confused.

"Go on and take it, then," she told him, her voice sharp. "I was saving it for a grandchild but there's no point to that now, is there?"

Azazel didn't understand her anger, but he did as he was told, dressing quickly before she could change her mind, while the soldier passed her a few coins.

The old woman retreated into her room a few minutes later. Azazel and the soldier went to bed as well, Azazel curling up next to the soldier for warmth. He'd tucked his gun under the mattress before they'd laid down, within easy reach, cautioning Azazel to under no circumstances to touch it.

The morning brought an automobile for them, and a driver, who met the soldier at the front door. Azazel hung back when the man knocked at the door, hiding behind his soldier's legs. By then he was all bundled up in wool and fur, a scarf wrapped around his face and the soldier's over-sized budenovka with its hammer and sickle pin settled on his head down past his ears, and the man at the door barely spared him a second glance.

"Your orders," the driver said, handing the soldier a sealed envelop. He opened it, read the papers inside, and tucked them in the pocket of his greatcoat.

They'd walked to the automobile, Azazel waddling under all the layers of clothing, and the two of them slid into the backseat while the driver started to car.

"Hell of a place to spend the night," the driver said, once they were on the road. "That's a nest of White vipers if ever I saw one."

"I needed a telegraph," the soldier said, "and there wasn't anywhere closer. And don't curse, especially in front of the boy – it's a sign of a vulgar mind."

"You're one of Trotsky's, aren't you?" the driver asked rhetorically. "So where are we headed?"

The solider glanced at the paper again and gave him instructions to head for an orphanage seventy-five kilometers outside of Petrograd. "That's sort of an odd place for an orphanage, isn't it – Isolated like that, I mean? And," he went on, a note of complaint in his voice, "this is all and awful lot of trouble for some orphan, if that's really what this is about. The country's full of orphans, and the rest of the continent has even more..."

The soldier's budenovka was too big on Azazel. The hat kept slipping over his eyes, so he took it off now, and pulled the scarf down from over his mouth because it itched.

"This isn't just any orphan," the soldier said.

"Eh?" the driver asked, glancing back at them in the rear-view mirror. When he saw Azazel's face for the first time he nearly went off the road.

"Shi –" he started to say, then thought better of it, his teeth clicking together so hard that Azazel could hear the sound. "No, I guess he isn't," he said at last.

They drove on.


End file.
